Thumbs Up For Cedar Mountain, Down For Segarra

Editorial: Thumbs up for saving Cedar Mountain, down for losing heat at park building

A thumbs up for the residents and conservationists in Newington who battled successfully to preserve picturesque Cedar Mountain as open space. Mayor Stephen Woods recently announced that the national home construction firm Toll Brothers was dropping its controversial six-year effort to build luxury homes on the mountain. The town will now try to buy the property and preserve it as open space.

There's a lesson here. Cedar Mountain is near and dear to many residents, a site for hiking, birding and mountain biking. But most of the land was privately owned and zoned either residential or commercial. It's no wonder it drew a major developer. Greater Hartford needs to preserve its remaining open space, lest it become one huge undifferentiated subdivision. If there is a significant swath of green space in your town, protect it while you can.

Thumbs down to Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra for his re-election campaign's false statements about challenger Luke Bronin. State and city records show that Mr. Bronin did indeed vote in the 2013 municipal election, contrary to the Segarra campaign's claim. The Segarra campaign accused Mr. Bronin of missing other Hartford elections since 2008. That's because from 2009 to the beginning of 2013, Mr. Bronin was living in Washington, D.C., working for the Obama administration, or in Afghanistan, serving as a Navy Reserve officer. Fact-check, please.

A mittened thumbs down to Gideon Asset Management, the New York company that bought 129 of the 180 condominiums in the curved 12-story Bushnell On The Park building in December. Despite tenant complaints about the heating system, it failed in the frigid final week of February, sending many residents scurrying for new quarters for five days, until the system was fixed. It was one of the largest residential evacuations in the city in recent memory. The firm must make good on its promise to upgrade the building.